LATIN AMERICAN POPULISM IN THE XXI CENTURY. Gustavo Coronel. 1. POPULIST POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN LATIN AMERICA. I fully agree with the description of populist leaders given by Julio Cirino in his presentation.i would like to add that Latin America has been long on populist political leaders and short on statesmen. Peron, Eva, Menem in Argentina; Vargas and Color de Mello in Brazil; Velasco Ibarra and Bucaram in Ecuador; Velasco Alvarado, Fujimori and Alan Garcia in Peru, Carlos Andres Perez and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are some of the many examples of populism in Latin American politics. Betancourt in Venezuela, Lleras Camargo in Colombia, Cardoso in Brazil are some of the few examples of statesmanship. During the last 100 years of Latin American history we can see how politics have prevailed over policies. The reason is that politics is short term oriented while policy formulation and execution are long term. Populist leaders belong to the short term but statesmen prefer to see beyond the immediate future. Populists are sprinters while statesmen are marathonists. This explains the preference of populist leaders for promises. Populists will always talk about the things they will do while statesmen talk about the things they have done. Populists share a vision of personal and absolute power. Statesmen usually share the power of a vision, which has much more to do with the improvement of their people than with their attempts to consolidate personal power. Populists are essentially dissonant leaders, in the terminology of emotional intelligence. They do not govern, they rule. As such their legacy is usually one of hate, resentment and fear.
The Dornbush& Edwards model is useful to understand the way populist leaders work. Populists, the model stipulates, are disdainful of economic constraints. They are free spenders. Their main theme is often wealth redistribution but they do not know how to create new wealth, so they restrict themselves to taking money from the have s, many of whom have earned it through hard work, to give handouts to the have nots s. To do this, they connect directly to the masses, commonly bypassing organized political parties and labor unions and promise them that they will get the money that the rich have taken away from them. In talking to the masses they use the ways of folklore. Bucaram danced, Chavez sings, Fujimori wore native headgear. Populists choose an enemy, often the rural and industrial elites and focus their hostility on them, sowing social and even racial hate among the population. They decide on wage increases by executive decree and combine them with price and exchange controls to give the masses a temporary illusion of prosperity. For them the poor are good, the rich are bad. I recently heard a neopopulist leader here in Washington, vice-president Garcia Liniera of Bolivia. He talked about building a strong Bolivian state, which can use the economic surplus to inject it into the communities, so that they can build what he calls a new Andean capitalism, combining big industry with small, family size enterprises. It made for an entertaining talk but he failed to tell the audience how could Bolivia generate economic surplus by ostracizing the private sector. 2. THE IMPACT OF HUGO CHAVEZ IN VENEZUELA AND ABROAD. Julio Cirino analyzed the role played by Hugo Chavez and his potential domestic and global impact. I agree with Cirino in that Chavez is a textbook example of neopopulism. He has made a direct connection with the masses through television. He has become a very authoritarian leader and what he calls participatory democracy only means participarle al pueblo, to tell the masses
after the fact what he has decided to do. Although he is driven by megalomania, just as the other populist leaders of the region, there are two factors that separate Chavez from most other populist Latin American leaders: one, he has a pocket full of money and, two, he is obsessed with destroying the empire, as he calls the United States. These two factors have driven him beyond Venezuelan borders, something that not even Juan Peron tried to do. In doing this Chavez has committed all the financial resources of Venezuela to structure a global anti-u.s. alliance. This is forcing him to neglect the domestic scene. He now spends most of his time and Venezuelan money abroad, buying loyalties from small countries by giving them handouts (Bolivia, the Caribbean states) or from big countries by promising them Venezuelan oil (China) or buying from them billions of dollars in weapons (Russia). His megalomania has gone global and he is now clearly aligned with the most dictatorial regimes of the world: Zimbabwe, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Cuba and with terrorist and/or drug trafficking paramilitary groups such as FARC and ELN in Colombia and Hezbollah in Lebanon (Hezbollah already has a small group active in northwestern Venezuela, near the city of Maracaibo). Some international observers of Hugo Chavez tend to give him credit he does not deserve, over estimating the effectiveness of his social programs, which are ill-planned and plagud with corruption. For example, when Chavez came to power in 1998 Venezuela already had a 93% literacy rate. But he claims to have eliminated illiteracy from the country, teaching 1.5 million Venezuelans to read and write in 18 months. This comes out to about two Venezuelans per minute, day in and day out. The United Nations denied that they had validated this claim. The Barrio Adentro mission, designed to give medical services to the poor in the barrios is, of course, a valid concept, but it cannot replace a structural, official health policy. While the Cuban medical and paramedical staff prescribe aspirins in the barrios, the Venezuelan hospitals lack the most essential equipment and facilities, starting with oxygen. I disagree with those observers who say that
Chavez s missions have come to solve problems that the traditional political parties cared very little about. Statistics reveal that many of the previous democraticvenezuelan governments in the period 1958 to about 1982 paid more attention to structural health policies than to programs designed for political effect. The missions give Venezuelans an illusion of being tended to, but the structural solutions to health and education are lacking. The same applies to the use of oil as a political tool. By giving oil for free to Cuba and subsidizing oil supplies to Bolivia and the Caribbean countries he is illegally disposing of more than $2 billion per year in money that belongs to the Venezuelan people, without getting very much in return, except vague and temporary promises of political loyalty. His initiatives of PetroAmerica, PetroCaribe, PetroSur and PetroAndina have not progressed beyond the conceptual stage. They represent empty promises, just as his idea of a $25 billion gas line from Venezuela to Argentina represents an irresponsible and typically populist maneuver. I do not agree about the irrevocability of Chavez s impact on Venezuelan political development or, even less, in the hemisphere. In fact, I think Chavez s regime represents an involution that will leave Venezuela in physical and spiritual ruin for two generations. His long-term hemispheric and global impact will probably be of similar magnitude to second category populist leaders and dictators such as Eva Peron, Kim IL Sung, Gahdaffi or Mugabe, never on the level of Fidel Castro. He reminds me, in his paradoxical combination of global messianic ambitions and small town, parochial manners, of the Mahdi who captured Khartoum and killed General Chinese Gordon in the late 19 th century. Hugo Chavez has conducted during the last eight years the most corrupt and one of the most inefficient governments in Venezuelan history. After receiving some $200 billion in oil income and doubling Venezuela s national debt he has managed to increase poverty and to deeply divide Venezuela s society, calling on racism and class struggle, as strategic allies to promote hate and resentment. He is the classical Dissonant Leader, as defined by
Daniel Goleman and collaborators in their book about Primal Leadership. As such he will leave no permanent imprint. 3. CONCLUSSION. I share an optimistic view of Latin American democracy. I think democracy in Latin America has made significant progress and remains a totally valid concept. In Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Central America, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico and, yes, even in Bolivia, democracy has so far prevailed. To those who despair about the uneven democratic development taking place in our region I say:democracy is an ideal. The fact that most countries have not reached this ideal is no reason to invalidate the concept. It would be like eliminating marriage as a valid institution just by looking at Elizabeth Taylor or Mickey Rooney s marital records..